Exploration

As any visitor can easily see, the new design is in place and seems to be working smoothly. In conjunction with the redesign, I’ve reworked the post structures and permanent URIs a bit. The old URIs won’t change (’cause, you know, they’re cool) but moving forward, I’ve tightened the URIs up a bit. In this, I followed Tantek’s lead to a large degree. Generally my posts won’t include a timecode since it’s highly unlikely that I’ll post more than once per day. (Shoot, any more I’m lucky to post more than once per week.) If I ever do need a timecode for a post, it will be simple enough to add; my XSLT is already set up to handle it.

You may also have noticed that the posts previous to today have disappeared from meyerweb’s home page, and from the RSS feeds. This happened because I rewrote some of the XSLT and changed the base XML structure of the archives, and trying to merge the old structure and transformations with the new ones was just too annoying for words. So I’ve basically hit the reset button on the posts, although the old posts are still available from the archives, just as they always were. It’s a temporary situation at best, since both the home page and RSS feeds will fill up as I write more entries.

As for the masthead image you can see today, it’s the same one I used for the Eos theme in the previous design, thus giving some minor sense of continuity to the process. (Said image is the intellectual property of Tantek Çelik and used with his permission, by the way.) The masthead image won’t remain constant—I’m planning to change it every week or two, with future images coming from photographs I’ve taken. I already have thirteen ready to go, culled from the two thousand or so images in my iPhoto library. I imagine that eventually I’ll add the ability to pick a favorite theme, or to pick one at random, or something. I might even add the ability for you to supply the URI of an image you particularly like, although that seems a little obscure. You can already do it with a user stylesheet anyway, since the site’s CSS signature (www-meyerweb-com) remains fully in place. For those who feel the urge, the masthead images are 1280 by 128 pixels in size, and I’ve tried to keep them to 25KB or less.

Gradual changes will probably continue to happen for a while, in fact. The sidebar content will be developed over time, for example. I may also slowly enhance the design from its current sparse styling. I doubt it’ll change a whole lot, to be honest, but I may from time to time test out new techniques or visual effects.

Let’s see, what else… oh yes. If you’re using Mozilla or Safari (and maybe Opera), notice what happens when you mouse over the title of the post. That’s generated content, not a background image, which is why Explorer doesn’t get the same effect. This fails to bother me, since it’s more fun visual frosting than anything critical. What’s interesting to note is that it doesn’t work in Safari 1.1 unless the border is changed in some way. If the hover effect is removed, no generated content. I wonder if that’s been fixed in the current internal builds.

The sidebar is absolutely positioned, and the gray area around the page content is the background of the html element (which means the black borders around the content are set for the body element). The sidebar assembly was reworked so that it’s easy to add different content for different areas of the site. For example, the Destinations on Kat’s page are different from those in my area of the site. I haven’t done a lot with this capability yet, but probably will as time goes on.

That’s about it for now. I’ll get back to the usual ramblings tomorrow.